Deepest Water
by Patchverse-SheCat
Summary: Song-fic to "Deep Water" by Jewel. After leaving Gambit in Antarctica, Rogue deals with an impending metal breakdown. (R&R please)


Disclaimer: The characters in this story do not belong to me. The song is property of Jewel. Read and Review please!  
  
The Deepest Water  
  
You find yourself falling down  
  
Your hope's in the sky but your heart's like a gun on the ground  
  
She wakes up. She doesn't want to move her arm to smash the alarm clock sitting on her bedside table. She does anyway, but she doesn't enjoy the sound of metal clicking and smashing inside the noisy pain-in-the-neck. A thin ray of sunlight filters into the room and focuses on a small picture, knocked face-down. The gold rim casts an odd vision on the wall, a twisted, deformed, molten reflection of a vine and leaf. It's as mangled and tortured as her soul.  
  
And you try to find yourself  
  
In the abstractions of religion and the cruelty of everyone else  
  
And you wake up to realize  
  
Your standards of living somehow got stuck on survive  
  
She stands by the door of her room, only half-dressed. In the mirror is reflected a girl in her twenties, a body to die for, a face as bright as the moon. The mirror also reflects the lines under her eyes, the horrible red in her cheeks, the way her hair has been reduced to the consistency of papier-mache. Gone to seed. Ever since he left, she'd gone to seed.  
  
When you're standing in deep water  
  
And you're bailing yourself out with a straw  
  
And when you're drowning in deep water  
  
And you wake up making love to a wall  
  
It's these little times  
  
That help to remind  
  
It's nothing without love  
  
Cursing as the shower water goes cold, she washes her hair. It's long, chestnut and white, finally grateful to see shampoo after so long. After the water finally becomes too frigid to bear, she steps out, purposefully avoiding the mirror. A country song plays on the radio and she waits for it to finish. As she does, it seems that time drags weary feet through her life. Time sprinted, once, let her make a decision she didn't want to make. Now, the words take an invisible form, they kiss her cheeks with mocking promises of everlasting love, they run teasing fingers through her hair. So close to real it scares her, she opens her eyes to see herself in the mirror. The song plays on, lost among the mists of the shower.  
  
You realize your only friends  
  
Have never been yourself or anyone who cared in the end  
  
That's when everything fades or falls away  
  
The chains that once held us are only the chains that we made  
  
After lunch, she sits in her room. The picture is still there, still face down. Though her conscience berates her, she refuses to look at it. It holds too many memories, too many memories. In her hand she holds a piece of cloth, what was once a headband. Jagged and ratty from her fingers kneading it constantly, it too holds a secret.  
  
When you're standing in deep water  
  
And you're bailing yourself out with a straw  
  
And when you're drowning in deep water  
  
And you wake up making love to a wall  
  
It's these little times  
  
That help to remind  
  
It's nothing without love  
  
Finally she reaches for the picture, holds it to her chest without looking. The edge of the frame bites into her skin. She doesn't care.  
In the silence that comes with summer heat, she looks down at the faces on the picture. A man looks back at her, hugging the past version of herself, three years ago. With hair that looks like the sunset woven into myriad strands and eyes that earned him the name "Le Diable Blanc", his smile lights up the picture. He stays there forever, trapped in the photograph for eternity. He will never leave from her bedside table; he will never leave from her heart.  
  
We've compromised our pride  
  
Sacrificed our health  
  
We must demand more not from each other  
  
But more from ourselves  
  
She throws the picture at the wall, wincing as the frame leaves a chip in the paint. The tears spill over from her eyes, staining her cheeks with the roses of sorrow. Flopping onto the bed, she sobs hopelessly into her pillow until it seeps into the sheets below. The man lies there on the floor, still smiling.  
She cries for the crimes she committed, for the choices she made. Was it her anger, her lifestyle that made her this way? Should she blame it on Mystique? Should she blame it on him, the man in the photo? Why can't she blame herself? Is she to blame?  
She's an unloved little girl. She can't change what was. She can't change what should have been.  
And she knows, no matter what they say, it was her and not him that broke this heart.  
  
When you're standing in deep water  
  
And you're bailing yourself out with a straw  
  
And when you're drowning in deep water  
  
And you wake up making love to a wall  
  
It's these little times  
  
That help to remind  
  
It's nothing without love  
  
When she goes to bed, the coldest draft possible enters from the window. It wraps itself around her head and whispers nightmares into her ear, tickles her spine with ice. She shudders. If the man had had a sense of real revenge, he would be doing this to her now, sending the wind to haunt her nights. Another shiver runs down her spine. She picks the picture up from the floor, puts it next to the headband on the bedside table. He still smiles at her, a goofy lopsided grin to warm a thousand hearts. Before the tears can come again, she sleeps.  
  
Nothing without love, without love  
  
Nothing without love, without love  
  
Nothing without love, without love.  
  
She wakes up. She doesn't want to move her arm to smash the alarm clock sitting on her bedside table. 


End file.
